Cast: Guy Pearce, Helena Bonham Carter, Lindley Joyner, Brooke Harman
Director: Michael Petroni
Producers: Thomas Augsberger, Matthias Emcke, Shana Levine, Dean Murphy, Nigel Odell
Screenplay: Michael Petroni
Cinematography: Roger Lanser
Music: Dale Cornelius, Amotz Plessner
U.S. Distributor: Paramount Classics
Till Human Voices Wake Us contains elements that could make for a powerful, stirring tale of grief and redemption. Unfortunately, it is undone by the twin cinematic demons of pretentiousness and torpor. The film plods along, aimlessly and endlessly, occasionally interweaving pleasantly nostalgic memories of childhood with the dreariness of the current narrative. The resulting production quickly causes viewers to lose patience, then interest. And, when the catharsis arrives – as it must in a movie of this sort – it comes across as obvious, over-the-top, and even a little silly. It's as if someone forgot to tell writer/director Michael Petroni that metaphors are supposed subtle, not concrete. Or that all of life's answers are typically not found on a Scrabble board.
One of the film's central flaws lies in the narrative structure, which uses the tired cliché of having a man visit his childhood haunts and remember various events along the way. That man is Sam Franks (Guy Pearce), a deeply troubled and emotionally isolated psychoanalyst (in movies, is there any other kind?) who has traveled from Melbourne to Genoa (Australia) to bury his father. One stormy night, Sam sees a woman (Helena Bonham Carter) throw herself off a bridge and into a raging river. He snatches her body from the current, resuscitates her, then brings her to his late father's house. When she awakens, she has amnesia (obviously a recurrent plot device in Pearce movies – see Memento), and Sam sets about determining her identity. The truth is somehow wrapped up in his memories. When he was a teenager (and played by Lindley Joyner), he was inseparable from his best friend and could-be lover, Silvy (Brooke Harman), but something happened, and now events of the present force Sam to confront his past.
Given the limited number of characters and the parallelism of the two time lines, it doesn't take a viewer of Sherlock Holmes' deductive capabilities to divine the woman's identity. Is saying this a spoiler? Only for those who aren't paying attention. However, since we figure it out so early in the proceedings, we become increasingly impatient with Sam's inability to see what is obvious to us. It's always painful when movie characters are slow on the uptake, and even moreso when the director uses a somnambulant tone to intensify the protagonist's obtuseness.
Admittedly, the scenes with the kids are enjoyable. The two young actors, neither of whom is familiar to me, generate a nice rapport. I was disappointed every time the timeline switched back to the present. If there's a reason to see Till Human Voices Wake Us, it has everything to do with the flashbacks and nothing to do with the dull, lugubrious modern-day sequences. And, as is easy to determine by on the title (which is derived from a line in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), Petroni's approach is high-handed. The gravity of tone suggests that he has some deep truth to impart, when, in actuality, all he has done is crafted an uninvolving tearjerker. By the end of the film, there probably will be a few members of the audience reaching for Kleenexes – those who are not asleep. Wake us, indeed.
© 2003 James Berardinelli